Charles Hazlitt Cahan PC KC (October 31, 1861 – August 15, 1944) was a Canadian lawyer, newspaper editor, businessman, and provincial and federal politician.
In private business, Cahan was a lawyer and financier for extensive tramway operations in South America, Trinidad and Mexico.
Secretary, Liberal-Conservative Association, Nova Scotia, and Director of Public Safety for Canada during World War I.
In his article, "The Role of Lawyers in Corporate Promotion and Management: A Canadian Case Study and Theoretical Speculations" (see link below), Marchildon states, "With his four-year arts degree, as well as a law degree from the Dalhousie Law School in Halifax, Charles Cahan was one of the few formally educated practitioners in late nineteenth century Canada.
This gave Cahan flexibility and, rather than immediately pursuing a legal career, he worked first as a newspaper editor and then became a politician.
Between 1887 and 1891, an attempt by Cahan and others to secure a federal civil service appointment for John James Stewart, owner of the Halifax Herald and Mail, came to nothing.
Cahan's policies were clearly ahead of their time, as in a review of Glassford's book, Reaction and Reform: The Politics of the Conservative Party under R.B.
The Court found that it was within the Dominion government's authority to end appeals to the Privy Council unilaterally without the approval of the provinces.
The government postponed the implementation of the legislation until after the Second World War, and after an unsuccessful appeal to the Privy Council of the Supreme Court's decision.
As stated by McEvoy in Religion and Politics in Foreign Policy: Canadian Government Relations with the Vatican, "Cahan, though a Presbyterian, had forged close contacts with the Catholic clergy both in his native Nova Scotia and later in Quebec.
He had come to the conclusion that domestic peace in Canada was largely dependent upon the happiness of the French Canadian people and clergy.
Finding Bennett unwilling to intervene, Cahan wrote on his own responsibility to the British Chargé d'affaires to the Holy See, George Ogilvie-Forbes, requesting him to raise the matter delicately at the Vatican, an initiative approved by Archbishop Gauthier of Montreal...In September 1931 Ogilvie-Forbes told Cahan that "the subject of your last letter has reached the proper and highest quarters.'
This speech provoked a minor political incident due to what was taken to be Canada's implicit recognition of Japan's occupation of China.